Save Our Students

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"When Dr. Napier came to me offering this job, I saw the lightning flash. I heard the thunder roll... I cried, 'My God, why has thou forsaken me?' And the Lord said, 'Joe, you're no damn good. ...you're no earthly good at all, unless you take this opportunity and do whatever you have to... transform and transmogrify this school into a special place... where the hearts and souls and minds of the young can rise.'"

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Nobody's school system is perfect, but some are really bad. Whether it's a single class that's lost the will to learn, or an entire school that would be "better off as a parking lot", the students that go here are only an inch from completely giving up on themselves — if they haven't already. And just when all is darkest, here comes a new teacher...

The students will be inspired to ace their SATs, or finally graduate from the 10th grade, or not join that gang, or even get a passing grade on a single test. Sometimes they win some competition. You can always expect one student to say "You don't know shit about us!" in the beginning and be the most antagonistic towards the new teacher. But over the course of the story, they'll have a HeelFace Turn and become the teacher's biggest supporter and star pupil. Often, at the end, the teacher will leave again for one reason or another, but not without the class thanking him in a deep, heartfelt manner, especially the former troublemaker.

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Often, though not always, has a racial/class element to it, with either a white, sheltered teacher in a gun-ridden Inner City School, or a black, fought-his-way-to-the-top teacher among privileged-but-bored upper-class white kids. Also has a strong tendency toward Glurge.

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Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Great Teacher Onizuka is a fairly downplayed example despite the name. He doesn't teach them how to do well in school and ace all their tests or whatever, but rather teaches them about the moral principles necessary to live a good life. And usually by accident, at that.

Gokusen's Yankumi literally saves the school from being closed, in one episode.

Episode 11 of Excel Saga is a merciless parody of this, though more focused on being a better baseball team than students.

Done in the beginning of Mahou Sensei Negima!. Negi's class happens to be the worst on campus. Under Negi's leadership, they manage to hit the #1 rank. Then after the resident Mad Scientist (and smartest person in the whole school) transfers out, they promptly drop to second-to-last.

Class 3-E of Assassination Classroom contains the students with the school's lowest grades, where they are subject to all sorts of school sanctioned mockery, bullying, and oppression in order to motivate the rest of the school to work hard to keep their grades up. One of the major premises of the series revolves around Koro-sensei (a nigh unkillable super-creature hell bent on destroying the world) becoming Class 3-E's new homeroom teacher and inspiring the students to excel despite their circumstances. It may very well be the most gloriously outlandish examples of this trope in all of fiction.

From Iruka's perspective, this is the plot of Jewelpet Sunshine. Iruka is the teacher assigned to the Plum class, considered the worst class in Sunshine Academy. His approach is to be as gung-ho about everything as possible. In the epilogue, almost all of the students are leading successful lives.

Comic Books

Spider-Man: Peter Parker briefly turned into one of these. And of course, he was much better as a superhero than as a teacher.

Films — Live-Action

One of the classic examples would be To Sir, with Love, starring Sidney Poitier. In what might seem Hilarious in Hindsight to people who grew up with the modern version of this trope (white teachers, minority students), the film has an educated black teacher helping out inner-city white youths.

About a decade earlier, Poitier was on the other side of this, playing the ringleader of a classroom full of delinquents that Glenn Ford tries to reach in Blackboard Jungle. It's still one of the best, partly because the progress is slower and harder than in most of these examples. The end is only the beginning of victory.

Lean on Me, starring Morgan Freeman. However, Freeman's Joe Clark turns the school around by kicking all the troublemakers off campus and applying no-nonsense "tough love" to the rest. The movie is claimed to be based on a true story, but it takes some liberties. Essentially, everything in the movie except the main character's name... is a liberty.

Stand and Deliver is similarly based on a true story, though a much more idealistic one.

The Principal also takes the tough love approach, straight to a climactic fistfight pitting the titular principal against the leader of one of the gangs that ravage the school.

Sister Act 2 fits the formula quite well, and it allows the sequel to be different from the first film.

An interesting variant appears in the 1987 movie Summer School, where a clueless gym teacher is forced to teach a remedial English class during the summer, and will be fired if his students don't pass the end of the term test. So,instead of applying the Trickster Mentor method, he promises to do each kid a favor if they study.

Dead Poets Society: One student ends up dead, and another gets expelled. The remaining students learn, though. Those two students had bad "endings" because one had an oppressive father and the son couldn't handle the constant verbal abuse and over-the-top expectations so he committed suicide. The second student arguably misinterprets the teacher's advice and goes a bit too far with it, although it is also suggested that he was a naturally rebellious type who would have rubbed the school establishment up the wrong way at some point anyway.

Les Choristes has a failed musician who becomes a supervisor, and turns his class into a Cherubic Choir, transforming the mischievous children's lives in the process.

Simultaneously parodied and played straight in High School High. The school is initially absurdly run down and overrun by criminals, but Mr. Clark plays the "kindhearted Cool Teacher" trope pretty much straight. Him being The Comically Serious is part of the joke.

Wonderfully parodied in Hamlet 2, when the teacher thinks of himself as saving both the drama program and his gangbanger students, but it turns out that the kids are pretty well-off and get good grades, and they end up being the ones to save the teacher and his stuck-up pet students.

Also parodied in that the 'teacher' is a struggling ex-actor who, much to the bemusement and derision of his students, gets all his ideas on how to teach from these kinds of movies.

This is actually the main plot in Lambada (1990), of all films. It wasn't supposed to feature the trendy dance when it was written, but Cannon Pictures wanted to beat a rival B-Movie studio's lambada film to theaters, so they added some dance scenes to it.

Done in the movie Only the Strong. The protagonist teaches his proteges how to use Capoeira, which somehow reforms them into better people using team mentality to go against the local gang.

The Ron Clark Story, with Matthew Perry as the titular teacher who goes to teach inner-city middle schoolers.

Inverted in the HBO movie Cheaters. The teacher comes in to coach the Academic Decathalon Team which is a Super Bowl for nerds. Intimidated by the school team that had won the competition every year, the team members stumble upon a copy of the test. When said teacher finds out, he encourages the team to cheat.

Coach Carter is based on the real story of Kenneth Carter. This story is a variant where the teacher is actually a High School basketball coach who enforces a strict regime and code of conduct for his players, including getting good grades. To enforce it, he is perfectly free to tackle his players since he is not a teacher. When too many of his players are slacking off seriously on their studies, he suspends all team activities until he sees some real improvement and must fight for his decision with the school board and the public.

Played straight in Freedom Writers, based on "The Freedom Writers Diary," which is a non-fiction book. The Los Angeles riots have split the school apart. Fights break out, gangs are formed, racism and abuse abound. Teacher Erin Gruwell takes on the task of teaching an integrated classroom of at-risk students, also known as "unteachables".

Played equally straight in 1999's Music of the Heart, starring Meryl Streep as Roberta Guaspari, the teacher who started the Harlem Schools Violin Program. And yes, it was also based on a true story. Unfortunately, the focus is less on this trope, and more on the Very Special Episode aspect of raising awareness of the importance of music education in schoolsnote It was released at the height of VH1's "Save the Music" campaign, which seeks to stop schools from cutting music education programs, and / or reinstating them in schools that already have..

The Substitute movies are a rather dark and action-y take on the old formula, as the main character's approach to violent gang-bangers invading the school isn't so much to instill them with a passion for academics as it is to smash them in the face and then throw them out a 3rd-story window. Not terribly inspirational, but perhaps more fun to watch.

The Emperor's Club applies this to rich kids. Kevin Kline is the Roman History teacher at a prestigious boarding school, and is trying to get through to an arrogant problem student, played by Emile Hersch. In the end, he fails: the kid grows up to be financially successful but morally bankrupt. Kline feels better, though, when he sees that all of his other former students are happy, well-adjusted and respectable.

Deconstructed in The History Boys. Irwin is hired by the principal in order to get the pupils to pass the Oxbridge examinations, and he succeeds. Specifically, he succeeds through his encouragement of lies and pretense, the sort of thing that the inspirational Cool Teacher was trying to steer them away from. And the Cool Teacher gropes his pupils. And the principal doesn't really care about the students as much as the school's ranking.

Parodied in one scene in La La Land, where Mia auditions for one of these films.

Mia:(reading from a script) This is my classroom! You don't like it, the door's to my left! Casting Director: Lady, why you be trippin' like that? Mia: No, Jamal... You be trippin'!

Played with in Class of 1984, which is about a music teacher starting at a troubled Inner City School - where the troublesome students aren't just delinquents, they're outright sociopaths! The plot is about the teacher's attempts to improve his music class while the delinquents terrorise him as much as possible (they're not in his class but one of his students is given drugs from the gang and dies because of it). One sequence has a science teacher getting revenge on the gang (they kill all his animals saving two students from assault) by bringing a gun to class and forcing them to answer questions at gunpoint! And then the climax is really about the teacher hunting down the gang and killing them one by one after they kidnap his wife.

The German comedy Fack ju Göhtenote a horribly (and deliberately) mangled attempt at writing "Fuck you, Goethe" is about a small-time bank robber who hid the spoils from his last job in a construction site just before the cops caught him. When he's released from prison some years later, construction has long since wrapped up, forcing him to accept a teaching job at the newly built Goethe Comprehensive School as a cover for his attempt to recover the booty. Naturally, his rough and disrespectful behavior gets him put in charge of the school's most troublesome class, with the story proceeding exactly as expected from there.

Literature

The school in The Year of Miss Agnes has one room, teaches things decades out of date, can't hold onto a teacher, and doesn't even bother trying to teach the town's only deaf mute.

The children's book Miss Nelson Is Missing! is arguably a parody. A classroom of rowdy grade school kids is scared straight when their normal kindly teacher, the titular Miss Nelson, is replaced by a mean and strict substitute, Miss Viola Swamp. They're all too glad to have Miss Nelson back, and never suspect Miss Swamp was Miss Nelson in disguise, aiming to teach her class a lesson.

Another book, aimed at the 10- to 14-year-old-crowd, is called They're Torturing Teachers in Room 104. It's about a group of kids who drive out every teacher they have, most within less than one day, until a magical teacher named Miss Merriweather comes. She makes all the kid's pranks backfire on them (a gum bubble grows to the size of a weather balloon and pops on the girl who's blowing it; a boy who mocks one of the girl's concerns about her hair gets his turned blue and curly, with an irremovable big pink bow) and eventually turns them into respectful, self-motivated students through Applied Phlebotinum.

Push by Sapphire: Precious' basic reading/writing class is a mild example. The average age in the class was around 19. What makes it mild is this is not the main thrust of the book.

Don't Care High may qualify, in that the entire student body doesn't care about much of anything, with the epitome of this being the student who ends up being used to help turn the school around. The one actually behind the reversal is a newly-transferred freshman from Saskatchewan.

The book Shut Up And Let The Lady Teach, by Emily Sachar, is about a (white) education newspaper reporter who taught in a (primarily black) New York school for one year, teaching a subject she wasn't really authorized to teach about.

The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy, adapted as a theatrical film (Conrack) as well as a TV movie (see Live Action TV, below).

Michael Flynn's Firestar Series involves a charter school company encouraging students to competence on a massive scale - and that's before the copycats get in on the act.

Played for laughs in Hating Alison Ashley, when a new young teacher starts teaching a rowdy class of students at a rough Sucky School and, much to the astonishment of everyone, manages to get them under control. It's not because she inspires them, however; instead, it's because her surly, sarcastic 'I'm-not-gonna-take-any-shit-from-any-of-you-little-bastards' manner ends up terrifying the living crap out of them.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix inverts this. The teacher is a Ministry appointed tyrant who suppresses Defence Against the Dark Arts education and dishes out horrific punishments - resulting in the students forming a secret society to learn the spells they should be getting taught in class. Later in the story, the Tyrant Takes the Helm (the character Umbridge is the former trope namer for that) and the entire school conspires to drive her nuts until she resigns.

Deconstructed in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The title character fulfills all expectations at first, but it slowly becomes clear that she's having a very harmful effect on her students, which she remains completely unapologetic about. Highlights include grooming a girl that reminds her of herself to be the Replacement Goldfish in an affair with the art teacher, and influencing another girl to fight (and die!) in the Spanish Civil War.

Ms Wiz's first book introduces Ms Wiz as a Cool Teacher who must take on the troublesome Class Three. Of course she's actually a witch (sorry, Paranormal Operative) and she manages to earn the children's respect both by magic and unconventional teaching methods (such as teaching them math by having her pet owl poo in a pin when they get a sum wrong). She leaves the school at the end of the book, but reappears in their lives as a Blithe Spirit whenever they need help (as a doctor, babysitter, library assistant etc).

Live-Action TV

The Water Is Wide, a Made-for-TV Movie, and one of few examples of this trope that is not set in the city. The idealistic young teacher in this film worked in a run-down school located on Yamacraw Island in South Carolina. See RealLife.

Kotter doesn't exactly revolutionize the school. He becomes reasonably popular with his students, but they remain solidly mediocre.

However, since the principal fully expected them to drop out without the skills to survive, the fact that Kotter kept them in school, let alone with some enthusiasm, is a worthwhile feat.

The '80s sitcom Head of the Class inverted this by giving Howard Hesseman's Mr. Moore a classful of academically gifted students who were so singularly focused on achievement and grades that their social and emotional development was lacking.

This episode deconstructs this trope. The teacher is killed by another teacher who's basically a jaded, older version of her, when she tries to get him to confess to drug use to save the future of the student he forced to carry for him. The student in question feels so responsible for her death that he descends into the life of crime he would've had without her intervention, despite his obvious talent as a writer. Ouch.

On the other hand, one of the students went on to become a teacher and teaches at the same school hoping to help the students like she helped him. There is also a memorial with flowers dedicated to her outside the school, with a plaque that says "She made a difference."

Inverted in the episode "8.03AM", when the white teacher at an inner-city school has a black pupil who is genuinely trying his best (it's not his fault that his education so far has been so bad he can barely read), but instead of encouraging him, she mocks and insults him in front of the class.

Parodied in a few Armstrong and Miller sketches where the apparently earnest teacher has the ability to engage his students in a matter of moments and gets them really interested in learning. Then the bell rings, and he stops in mid-sentence and tells them to fuck off because it's his time now.

Deconstructed throughout the fourth and fifth seasons of The Wire with several characters, notably three of the main kids meeting ends ranging from Michael taking up Omar's mantle after his death to Dukie's and Randy's being downright tragic. And the teachers are usually pretty helpless, against both the violence pervading the school as well as the looming threat from superiors in the school system of losing their jobs and their funding unless they either bring test scores up or "juke the stats". It seems as though only the "stoop kids" and the "corner kids" from Bunny Colvin's experimental class have any sort of a happy ending.

Disgaea 3 does this on occasion, with Evil Academy having various difficulties after the former dean died ...sort of..., and his immediate heir didn't exactly take care of the academy in his stead. With the administrators almost entirely being demons, very little stands in the way of the academy falling apart. Then again, with the students almost entirely being demons, nobody really cares. (They're a bit more interested with Tyrant Overlord Baal swiping their stuff.) Despite all this, Mr. Champloo still has his teaching integrity. Helps that he had direct orders from the former Overlord to keep the academy from falling into an even deeper level of hell.

Wealthy, Succesful Protagonist: I've got to use tough love to help this Latin American teenager to believe in himself.

Western Animation

One episode of American Dad! had Roger dress up as a professor and spout "inspirational" nonsense which convinces one of his students to kill his father.

Bob's Burgers: In "Bob and Deliver", Bob becomes a substitute home economics teacher, only to learn the class is considered a dumping ground for underachieving students and involves them sitting around watching educational videos. Bob manages to inspire the kids to enjoy learning how to cook, to the point where they open a successful student-run restaurant, but it brings him in conflict with the company that provides Wagstaff School's lunches.

Parodied in an episode of Family Guy, in which Brian gets a job as a teacher and tries to inspire his students. He soon grows frustrated and apathetic. In the end, he only manages to inspire his students to be the best prostitutes and janitors (and ditch diggers) they can be. This is complete with a Shout-Out to Dead Poets Society.

Also parodied in Pinky and the Brain, where the Brain becomes a teacher to earn money for his latest plot. Pinky joins his class ... but despite being a parody, the trope itself plays straight, including a fight breaking out when the miracle teacher is absent.

Stand and Deliver (see Movies) is parodied mercilessly in a South Park episode, where Cartman is sent to teach at an inner city high school. He takes on the pseudonym "Mr. Cartmenez" out of fear the pupils would outright murder a WASP teacher, and teaches the kids to cheat their way to the top, including talking one girl into getting an abortion because it's the ultimate form of cheating.

Mr. Cartmenez: How do I reach these keeeds?

Real Life

As noted above, Freedom Writers is non-fiction.

Similarly, Dangerous Minds was based on an autobiographical account: My Posse Don't Do Homework.

The high profile "Superheads" assigned to failing British comprehensives by local authorities in the early 2000s were supposed to be Truth in Television examples of the trope. The jury is still out as to how effective they were.

The Teach For America program hopes to inspire this, using people who who wouldn't normally be teachers. It has a UK equivalent called Teach First. Both are notorious for burning their teachers out by assigning ill-trained but well-meaning individuals to the toughest schools.

The solution-du-jour lately to save inner city students from themselves has been to create "charter schools": privatized non-union institutions that rely on private (and occasionally public) funding and tuition to operate, like a cheaper version of a prep school.

Pat Conroy was a teacher before he sold his first book. His memoir of this, The Water Is Wide got adapted twice.

This trope is Older Than Television. In Upper Canada (now Southern Ontario) in the 1830s and 1840s, some schools were set up to teach the children of the local Black community. These schools were generally run by white Abolitionists who were teaching what was considered "proper" in those days, though the prevailing attitudes of the time led to segregation of the Black students from the white students.

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